Maybe it is that simple. But then again I've never seen anybody using it. I've never seen anybody even showing off the fact that their phone can do it.
Perhaps videocalling is just plain not useful or interesting or fun. I guess we'll find out shortly, because if there's anybody who can get average people to use more phone features, it's Apple.
It's easy to say that, but if it was so obvious then why did it take an outside computer company to come in and put it all together when there were already a bunch of big rich technology companies who had been fighting for marketshare for years?
If it was so obvious, then why didn't Palm make the Pre until after the iPhone came into existence? I guess their decade long head-start just quite wasn't long enough for them to release this entirely obvious product.
There are a whole bunch of websites that I've been browsing almost every single day for years, and have never personally given them even a dime of my money. If it wasn't for advertisers paying some bills, then I wouldn't get to do that.
Accept the reality. Content isn't free to produce. Someone has to pay for it. You can mumble whatever you want about subscriptions or micropayments or whatever, but the reality is that all of that stuff implemented on a large scale would be just annoying as your average web ad, and you'd rather not pay anyways.
That's not to say that some ads are more tasteful while others are purposefully aggravating and quite annoying. But to pretend that everything would be puppies and roses if web ads went away is to ignore how the world works.
Over the course of an average day, I probably walk by at least a couple hundred people using mobile phones, and I have never once seen someone using video chat on their phone.
Whether or not their phones could technically do it before isn't the point. Whether it's through technology, design, marketing, or some combination of all three, Apple's definitely got a history of taking these sorts of things mainstream. And that's pretty interesting.
The reality is,(with a few exceptions I'm sure)that for any reasonably complex application, a native app can almost certainly be superior than a web app. If the SDK and API's are even halfway decent, you're going to have way more options programming directly to the OS than you will going through a web browser. Not to mention that native apps can gain easy access to UI elements that are consistent within that OS. These benefits hold true on a desktop computer as well as a phone/tablet/whatever.
Now that doesn't mean that farmville is going to take full advantage of all of that, but at least they have that opportunity. Honestly, if I was in Farmville's position, I'd have released a native iPhone App and also would be working on an HTML5 version. If you've got the resources, you should put your best foot forward on any platform that you think will make you money.
You do realize that there's a difference between having a webcam sitting on top of your monitor and sending live video from your phone, right? Not to mention that Apple's version of it will probably be about as simple as making a phone call.
Like they said in the keynote, this isn't some new idea, this is a "vision of the future" that predates Apple, but finally starting to become a reality. It's about damn time, too.
He's saying they're smart as a way of defending them being dicks to other people. I don't care if they're smart. I don't care how smart they think they are. I don't care that they have a title that reminds them that they're smart. That doesn't justify them feeling superior to other people and treating others like they're inferior or unworthy or whatever.
Depending on how you define the frame of reference, you could just say that you and your spaceship didn't move at all, and mars traveled millions of kilometers to come hang out with you.
I wouldn't argue that they don't deserve the title, but I don't think there's any title out there that makes it acceptable for anyone to be a dick to other people by default.
Sure, becoming a doctor is a real achievement, and I've got no problem with someone proudly putting Dr. before their name. But to be arrogant about it, or to think that it in any way makes you better than the average person is ridiculous.
Being polite does not take any extra time/work/concentration. It's something that if you make even the littlest bit of effort towards, it quickly becomes second nature and automatic.
I'd prefer to be treated in a hospital where the doctors and their nurses don't have such a silly angst towards each other. People who aren't completely miserable while at their jobs tend to do better work.
Just because someone hasn't been through medical school doesn't mean that they couldn't have gone to medical school. Am I automatically less intelligent because I chose a career that isn't in the field of medicine, or that doesn't require a few extra years of school? It's not like the day I got my bachelor's degree I stopped learning new things. I learn more every day while working.
I'm sure there are plenty of doctors out there that are smarter than me. I'm also sure there are plenty of doctors out there that are dumber than me. I hope that all doctors out there know more about medicine than me, but I'm willing to bet that very few of them know more about my profession than I do.
The fact that someone spent more time in school than someone else doesn't automatically means that they're smarter than them, it probably just means that their priorities were different. And it certainly doesn't give them the right to be an elitist asshole. Cure cancer, and then you've earned the right to be an elitist asshole. But even then, you're still an asshole, and you should expect people to respond accordingly.
It is extremely rare these days to build a building with load-bearing brick walls. To go up more than a couple stories, the walls end up being ridiculously thick, and as a result ridiculously heavy. So you end up not just paying for lots more brick, but also for a much more serious foundation. Your labor costs also go way up, because bricklaying is time consuming, and harder to do well than you might think.
Most brick buildings are just a veneer, whether they're over concrete, steel, or wood. Wood is actually one of the hardest to do, because the wood tends to shrink over time while the brick tends to expand due to heat and moisture. The brick is tied back to the wood pretty regularly, so these changes can cause serious cracking if you don't design for it.
That's a pretty lame argument. The reality of the web is that many (most) webpages reference other content, and the default behavior of a web browser is to access that content and display it where the html tells it to.
I wish I could go get a sandwich at the shop down the street without having to wait in line for 10 minutes, but rather than give the shop owner a bill for my wasted time, I accept the fact that the world is full of trade-offs. And when the trade-offs are obvious I can factor them into my decisions, and it would be silly for me to complain afterwards if I didn't like the decision that I made.
Supposedly if you took a hydrogen atom and scaled it up so that the single proton nucleus was the size of a basketball, the electron would end up as a tiny spec "orbiting" miles away. The proton is the center, and the electron forms the outer edge of the atom. But all of that space in between is empty. Even take a heavier atom, like lead and scale it up. You get more basketballs hanging out at the center, then a whole bunch of empty space, then a bunch of tiny electrons flying around. The heaviest, most dense material you've ever held in your hand was still mostly empty space.
In the everyday world, atoms generally don't interact by having their sub atomic particles bounce off of each other, various forces interact when they get close, and keep them from actually hitting each other. But a neutrino is basically immune to those forces, so unless it happens to actually hit another bit of subatomic mass, it just zooms on through all that empty space inside the atom and keeps on going.
And on a side note, when they say that a tablespoon or whatever of a neutron star weighs billions of tons, the reason why that is possible is because the gravity there has overcome all of the different forces that make atoms bounce off of each other, as well as the forces that hold the electrons so far from the nucleus. In a neutron star, that empty space is getting squeezed away.
Seriously. Here's a system that, if put into widespread use, would not only make their game more appealing to players, but should also decrease their support costs by significantly reducing an issue that is a completely pain in the ass for all parties involved.
How many people does Blizzard employ just to spend all day taking care of hacked account related issues? They should be doing everything they can to make that problem go away.
To be fair to you, perhaps you've never been out in open water and don't understand just how big something like the gulf is. You're not just looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil, you're looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil and billions of gallons of water.
I'm curious as to why you've referred to the dinosaur population pre-extinction as stagnant. I'm not suggesting that you're wrong, just interested in what that might mean.
Yeah, office is certainly big for them, no argument there.
You're also correct about certain significant computing tasks being tied to a real keyboard for all practical purposes. Microsoft could probably shut down all of it's consumer related divisions tomorrow, and continue to be plenty profitable for years just by selling office software to businesses. But even if they could stay afloat like that, being relevant only in the area of word processing and spreadsheets is a rather lame fate for a company that basically had a stranglehold on the computer world a decade or so ago.
While it'll never completely replace desktop machines, mobile computing is obviously the next big thing, and where all of the growth is going to be for at least the next few years. And microsoft has become all but irrelevant there. The only thing going for Microsoft in this case is that they pulled themselves out of a mildly similar position once before, when they finally realized that the Internet was a big deal, and they threw together IE to catch up with Netscape.
But that situation was only mildly similar. They've got more than one real competitor this time, and I don't think Apple or Google are going to sit back and relax for a couple years like Netscape did. They can't undercut google on price, and they aren't going to beat Apple at hardware/software integration. They can't bundle a mobile device in with windows, and the interface differences with a touchscreen basically throw out a lot of the software lock-in that might exist. I do not envy the position that they are in.
Microsoft's first answer to every problem has been to protect/promote Windows, even when that wasn't a viable strategy. At first they tried to ignore the internet because it conflicted with their idea of Windows, and then when that didn't work, they came up with IE and tried to use that to tie the internet to Windows. Windows is their biggest cash cow, it's their marketshare dominance, it's the heart of their company. (One big exception to this is the Xbox, which despite not making any money, has at least been successful in terms of marketshare. If the Xbox dropped you into a windows desktop when you powered it up, it probably would've failed pretty hard).
They're finally starting to get it, but at this point, they're years behind.
I think that profanity actually serves a pretty useful purpose in language, and because of that I very severely limit my use of it.
Although I occasionally use it for humor, in general my family, friends, and coworkers know that if I use profanity, then I am likely extremely serious about whatever it is I'm talking about.
I also generally try to take the same approach towards talking loudly. I only wish that more of my coworkers would consider their volume similarly. Those stupid fucks.
Even with the general decrease in prices over the past couple of decades, for most people the price of a computer is still beyond the blind impulse buy range. People are not blindly throwing down $1000+, and they're not somehow being forced into buying Apple.
Everyone's used windows, they know there are PCs available for cheaper than the average mac, yet they're still paying the money and ending up happy about their purchase. There's nothing wrong with that. They aren't being taken advantage of, they aren't getting reamed. They're paying more money for a different product than you would, probably because they have different priorities than you.
I'm all for paying less for things in general, but there comes a certain point where quality costs money. Because people sometimes choose to pay for that quality doesn't mean they're getting ripped off.
They don't do this because people are irrational, and will bitch like crazy when you raise your prices. For whatever reason they'd rather get screwed over by a sleazy scalper than have a big company raise its prices.
What your missing is a dose of common sense. The goal wasn't to make absolutely sure that nobody anywhere got their hands on more than two iPads. The goal was to make it a little harder for someone to do so, to discourage resellers from buying a whole store's supply out.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it is that simple. But then again I've never seen anybody using it. I've never seen anybody even showing off the fact that their phone can do it.
Perhaps videocalling is just plain not useful or interesting or fun. I guess we'll find out shortly, because if there's anybody who can get average people to use more phone features, it's Apple.
It's easy to say that, but if it was so obvious then why did it take an outside computer company to come in and put it all together when there were already a bunch of big rich technology companies who had been fighting for marketshare for years?
If it was so obvious, then why didn't Palm make the Pre until after the iPhone came into existence? I guess their decade long head-start just quite wasn't long enough for them to release this entirely obvious product.
There are a whole bunch of websites that I've been browsing almost every single day for years, and have never personally given them even a dime of my money. If it wasn't for advertisers paying some bills, then I wouldn't get to do that.
Accept the reality. Content isn't free to produce. Someone has to pay for it. You can mumble whatever you want about subscriptions or micropayments or whatever, but the reality is that all of that stuff implemented on a large scale would be just annoying as your average web ad, and you'd rather not pay anyways.
That's not to say that some ads are more tasteful while others are purposefully aggravating and quite annoying. But to pretend that everything would be puppies and roses if web ads went away is to ignore how the world works.
Over the course of an average day, I probably walk by at least a couple hundred people using mobile phones, and I have never once seen someone using video chat on their phone.
Whether or not their phones could technically do it before isn't the point. Whether it's through technology, design, marketing, or some combination of all three, Apple's definitely got a history of taking these sorts of things mainstream. And that's pretty interesting.
The reality is,(with a few exceptions I'm sure)that for any reasonably complex application, a native app can almost certainly be superior than a web app. If the SDK and API's are even halfway decent, you're going to have way more options programming directly to the OS than you will going through a web browser. Not to mention that native apps can gain easy access to UI elements that are consistent within that OS. These benefits hold true on a desktop computer as well as a phone/tablet/whatever.
Now that doesn't mean that farmville is going to take full advantage of all of that, but at least they have that opportunity. Honestly, if I was in Farmville's position, I'd have released a native iPhone App and also would be working on an HTML5 version. If you've got the resources, you should put your best foot forward on any platform that you think will make you money.
You do realize that there's a difference between having a webcam sitting on top of your monitor and sending live video from your phone, right? Not to mention that Apple's version of it will probably be about as simple as making a phone call.
Like they said in the keynote, this isn't some new idea, this is a "vision of the future" that predates Apple, but finally starting to become a reality. It's about damn time, too.
He's saying they're smart as a way of defending them being dicks to other people. I don't care if they're smart. I don't care how smart they think they are. I don't care that they have a title that reminds them that they're smart. That doesn't justify them feeling superior to other people and treating others like they're inferior or unworthy or whatever.
Oh come on. How can a free market economist complain about how a private company decides to run their own store?
Depending on how you define the frame of reference, you could just say that you and your spaceship didn't move at all, and mars traveled millions of kilometers to come hang out with you.
I wouldn't argue that they don't deserve the title, but I don't think there's any title out there that makes it acceptable for anyone to be a dick to other people by default.
Sure, becoming a doctor is a real achievement, and I've got no problem with someone proudly putting Dr. before their name. But to be arrogant about it, or to think that it in any way makes you better than the average person is ridiculous.
Being polite does not take any extra time/work/concentration. It's something that if you make even the littlest bit of effort towards, it quickly becomes second nature and automatic.
I'd prefer to be treated in a hospital where the doctors and their nurses don't have such a silly angst towards each other. People who aren't completely miserable while at their jobs tend to do better work.
Everyone's got problems. That's not an excuse to be a dick to people.
Just because someone hasn't been through medical school doesn't mean that they couldn't have gone to medical school. Am I automatically less intelligent because I chose a career that isn't in the field of medicine, or that doesn't require a few extra years of school? It's not like the day I got my bachelor's degree I stopped learning new things. I learn more every day while working.
I'm sure there are plenty of doctors out there that are smarter than me. I'm also sure there are plenty of doctors out there that are dumber than me. I hope that all doctors out there know more about medicine than me, but I'm willing to bet that very few of them know more about my profession than I do.
The fact that someone spent more time in school than someone else doesn't automatically means that they're smarter than them, it probably just means that their priorities were different. And it certainly doesn't give them the right to be an elitist asshole. Cure cancer, and then you've earned the right to be an elitist asshole. But even then, you're still an asshole, and you should expect people to respond accordingly.
It is extremely rare these days to build a building with load-bearing brick walls. To go up more than a couple stories, the walls end up being ridiculously thick, and as a result ridiculously heavy. So you end up not just paying for lots more brick, but also for a much more serious foundation. Your labor costs also go way up, because bricklaying is time consuming, and harder to do well than you might think.
Most brick buildings are just a veneer, whether they're over concrete, steel, or wood. Wood is actually one of the hardest to do, because the wood tends to shrink over time while the brick tends to expand due to heat and moisture. The brick is tied back to the wood pretty regularly, so these changes can cause serious cracking if you don't design for it.
That's a pretty lame argument. The reality of the web is that many (most) webpages reference other content, and the default behavior of a web browser is to access that content and display it where the html tells it to.
I wish I could go get a sandwich at the shop down the street without having to wait in line for 10 minutes, but rather than give the shop owner a bill for my wasted time, I accept the fact that the world is full of trade-offs. And when the trade-offs are obvious I can factor them into my decisions, and it would be silly for me to complain afterwards if I didn't like the decision that I made.
Supposedly if you took a hydrogen atom and scaled it up so that the single proton nucleus was the size of a basketball, the electron would end up as a tiny spec "orbiting" miles away. The proton is the center, and the electron forms the outer edge of the atom. But all of that space in between is empty. Even take a heavier atom, like lead and scale it up. You get more basketballs hanging out at the center, then a whole bunch of empty space, then a bunch of tiny electrons flying around. The heaviest, most dense material you've ever held in your hand was still mostly empty space.
In the everyday world, atoms generally don't interact by having their sub atomic particles bounce off of each other, various forces interact when they get close, and keep them from actually hitting each other. But a neutrino is basically immune to those forces, so unless it happens to actually hit another bit of subatomic mass, it just zooms on through all that empty space inside the atom and keeps on going.
And on a side note, when they say that a tablespoon or whatever of a neutron star weighs billions of tons, the reason why that is possible is because the gravity there has overcome all of the different forces that make atoms bounce off of each other, as well as the forces that hold the electrons so far from the nucleus. In a neutron star, that empty space is getting squeezed away.
Seriously. Here's a system that, if put into widespread use, would not only make their game more appealing to players, but should also decrease their support costs by significantly reducing an issue that is a completely pain in the ass for all parties involved.
How many people does Blizzard employ just to spend all day taking care of hacked account related issues? They should be doing everything they can to make that problem go away.
To be fair to you, perhaps you've never been out in open water and don't understand just how big something like the gulf is. You're not just looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil, you're looking at filtering 20 million gallons of oil and billions of gallons of water.
I'm curious as to why you've referred to the dinosaur population pre-extinction as stagnant. I'm not suggesting that you're wrong, just interested in what that might mean.
Yeah, office is certainly big for them, no argument there.
You're also correct about certain significant computing tasks being tied to a real keyboard for all practical purposes. Microsoft could probably shut down all of it's consumer related divisions tomorrow, and continue to be plenty profitable for years just by selling office software to businesses. But even if they could stay afloat like that, being relevant only in the area of word processing and spreadsheets is a rather lame fate for a company that basically had a stranglehold on the computer world a decade or so ago.
While it'll never completely replace desktop machines, mobile computing is obviously the next big thing, and where all of the growth is going to be for at least the next few years. And microsoft has become all but irrelevant there. The only thing going for Microsoft in this case is that they pulled themselves out of a mildly similar position once before, when they finally realized that the Internet was a big deal, and they threw together IE to catch up with Netscape.
But that situation was only mildly similar. They've got more than one real competitor this time, and I don't think Apple or Google are going to sit back and relax for a couple years like Netscape did. They can't undercut google on price, and they aren't going to beat Apple at hardware/software integration. They can't bundle a mobile device in with windows, and the interface differences with a touchscreen basically throw out a lot of the software lock-in that might exist. I do not envy the position that they are in.
Microsoft's first answer to every problem has been to protect/promote Windows, even when that wasn't a viable strategy. At first they tried to ignore the internet because it conflicted with their idea of Windows, and then when that didn't work, they came up with IE and tried to use that to tie the internet to Windows. Windows is their biggest cash cow, it's their marketshare dominance, it's the heart of their company. (One big exception to this is the Xbox, which despite not making any money, has at least been successful in terms of marketshare. If the Xbox dropped you into a windows desktop when you powered it up, it probably would've failed pretty hard).
They're finally starting to get it, but at this point, they're years behind.
I think that profanity actually serves a pretty useful purpose in language, and because of that I very severely limit my use of it.
Although I occasionally use it for humor, in general my family, friends, and coworkers know that if I use profanity, then I am likely extremely serious about whatever it is I'm talking about.
I also generally try to take the same approach towards talking loudly. I only wish that more of my coworkers would consider their volume similarly. Those stupid fucks.
Even with the general decrease in prices over the past couple of decades, for most people the price of a computer is still beyond the blind impulse buy range. People are not blindly throwing down $1000+, and they're not somehow being forced into buying Apple.
Everyone's used windows, they know there are PCs available for cheaper than the average mac, yet they're still paying the money and ending up happy about their purchase. There's nothing wrong with that. They aren't being taken advantage of, they aren't getting reamed. They're paying more money for a different product than you would, probably because they have different priorities than you.
I'm all for paying less for things in general, but there comes a certain point where quality costs money. Because people sometimes choose to pay for that quality doesn't mean they're getting ripped off.
They don't do this because people are irrational, and will bitch like crazy when you raise your prices. For whatever reason they'd rather get screwed over by a sleazy scalper than have a big company raise its prices.
What your missing is a dose of common sense. The goal wasn't to make absolutely sure that nobody anywhere got their hands on more than two iPads. The goal was to make it a little harder for someone to do so, to discourage resellers from buying a whole store's supply out.